Letting the "Real Work" Begin

"It may be when we no longer know what we have to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we know which way to go, we have begun our real journey." -- Wendell Berry

It takes existential skills to thrive in the present. People with existential learning styles tend to be highly introspective and find themselves deeply attuned and have a profound connectiveness to their inner selves. Connected internally in just this way, I have begun to have a firm understanding of my personal beliefs, preferences, and convictions.

For most of my life, I followed a safe path, but when I look back I was surrounded by uncertainty, avoided the unfamiliar, traded the unknown for what I knew. I did this to somehow safeguard what I felt was a reasonable attempt to failure-proof my life. I look back and I see what I was doing at the time and that it never occurred to me to go ahead and discard stability and try to understand the impossible, the unrealistic, or the unattainable.

I believe I have reached a point where I need to be doing the "real work" as Berry so well illustrates with the previous quote. I have begun to learn to thrive with the ambiguity I encounter as a part of my everyday life. "Learn to" being the operative part of the previous sentence, for it is an ongoing exercise to reach a comfortable existence with the beast that is ambiguity.